Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Instead of giving the ball back, for free, to a man who's made $204 million in his professional career, he probably should have held onto it, and sold it.

Cuz, he'll need the money to pay the tax bill.

Estimates of the value of the ball range up into the six figure range. Jeter was the first Yankee to get 3,000 hits...yea, I was surpised by that too...and only the second player to record as home run as his 3,000th hit.

As a "reward," the team gave him four free luxury suite seats for the remaining 40-odd home games (list price is $2,500 per seat per game, so that's roughly $400,000...altho the street price is about half that), seats that weren't exactly flying off the shelves to begin with, plus free seats for any post-season games the Yankees may host. So figure about half a million in income.

Lopez already owes about $100,000 in student loans. His tax bill will be slightly higher than that, so figure about $250,000 in debt that can never be discharged under a bankruptcy filing. He's stuck with it.

Assuming he accepts the seats. He can't sell them off because, guess what? He wouldn't be getting them if they weren't bloody available!

And any attempt on the part of Jeter or the Yankees to pay off his tax liability (and/or student loans) would be construed as yet another income event.

He's basically fucked unless he refuses the seats, but then he's given a valuable asset to a multimillionaire player and multibillion dollar organization for free.

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." -- Matt Santos, The West Wing